


Bright

by AdorableDoom



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-26
Updated: 2017-11-26
Packaged: 2019-02-06 22:41:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12827661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AdorableDoom/pseuds/AdorableDoom
Summary: When she dies, she takes all the light with her.





	Bright

**Author's Note:**

> Very mild spoilers for Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

   Luke dreams about her long before he ever holds her in his arms. (That day, that moment when she’s laid in his arms by the medical droid, so tiny and yet so perfect. There was never a better day, a better moment than that one.) In his dreams she shines brighter than anything he’d ever known. Years ago (so long ago, longer now than it seemed) Luke told Threepeio that if there was a bright spot in the galaxy, Tatooine was the furthest thing from it.  
   As he looks down at his daughter (she smiled at him, they say babies that young can’t smile but she smiled at him.), Luke knows that he’s holding the brightest thing in all the known galaxy in his arms.

  When she dies, she takes all the light with her. He knows, he knows she’s gone even as his heart, his mind, his soul, everything that he is rebels and rages against the devastating knowledge. Luke crawls his way out of ruin and devastation. He lived while so many (so young, they were all so very young. Too young, so young.) are gone. He emerges from the wreckage into a world on a fire.  
   A world that the light as gone out of.

   His daughter shone. She burned so brightly. Brighter than anything he had ever known. Brighter than anything that had ever been. Without her, the galaxy becomes cold and dark. It’s an ugly, terrible thing to be left behind in a world without her in it.  
   Incomprehensible.  
   More often than not, Luke wishes the flames had consumed him just as surely as they consumed everything he had tried so hard to rebuild.

  He sees her everywhere.  
  In the face of a child holding a mother’s hand in the marketplace on a moon he’s already forgotten the name of. He sees her eyes in a too young pilot that takes him near to the edge of known galaxy. She’s gone. He knows that. And yet, sometimes,     Luke is certain he can still feel her there on the edges of his mind.  
   Sometimes, he’s so certain, that the light is still there. The pain that follows then realization that he’s wrong again and again does not dull even as the years pass by.

   The year his daughter would’ve turned 14, Luke comes to Ach-To. The Caretakers aren’t thrilled to have him there but they tolerate him. Mostly they simply ignore him. He returns the favor. It’s a quiet world.  
In another life, he might have even thought it was beautiful. Lush and green. Still and quiet. She would have liked it here.

   Leia sends the girl to him.  
   His sister is not a cruel person, far from it. Leia is one of the kindest beings he’s ever known. Yet when she ascends the last steps, this girl, this girl who could be the child he lost so long ago, it seems an act of unfathomable cruelty. A reminder of what could have been. A reminder of what can never be.  
    Yet. . . Yet. . . She stands before him; afraid and yet so brave. She is so very brave. She has had to be so very brave for so very long. For so long, the world has been a place of darkness.  
   A place devoid of light.  
   Luke looks at her, looks into her eyes. He knows those eyes. Eyes he has dreamed about every night since the his universe shattered into a billion little pieces. The light comes slamming back in vivid, brilliant, burning iridescence. He dreamed about her before she was born.  
   He was the first one to hold her in his arms. Luke reaches out, not for the lightsaber but for her. She reaches from in the same moment. She feels it too. Just as Luke does. Just as Leia had. The lightsaber falls to the ground between them; forgotten.  
   There will be time for that later. For now, there is only this. The pair of them stand at the edge of the cliff, each clutching the other as if afraid that they will be pulled apart. (Not again. Not ever again. He will die before he lets that happen. Before he looses her again.)  
   His daughter.  
   His daughter who still shined brighter than anything he had ever known.

**Author's Note:**

> I've had only about an hour and 45 minutes of sleep today so if there's any mistakes I missed please let me know.


End file.
